From the blog

I’ve heard that quote said a number of times in the past and I found it funny, but lately I’ve given that concept a lot more thought. Obviously clothing is a wonderful invention that protects us in cases where our skin isn’t enough. But for everyday activities – climate and time of the year dependant – clothing just really isn’t necessary. Yes society calls it necessary, but our bodies really weren’t meant to be trapped in clothing all day.

My grandma has terrible varicose veins in her feet and her toes are all disfigured from years of being cramped into fashionable shoes. Obviously high heels are the extreme, but our feet were designed to be perfect in themselves. I was watching a movie today in which they were studying the bodies of early aboriginals in the late 1800s who had not experienced our ‘civilized’ creature comforts. They spent their entire lives barefoot in the wilderness, and the anthropologists and doctors were admiring the feet of the Aboriginals, saying they were perfect and without any flaws. You know what that says to me? It tells me the human body knows exactly how to take care of itself without shoes. It tells me that modern footwear might make us run faster or jump higher, but when it comes down to everyday use, cramming your foot into a shoe for most of the day is bad.

The same can be said about the rest of the body, and that is backed up by scientific proof. The skin is built to repel moisture, breathe, sweat, and sense the environment. The body can do all of this without the aid of clothing, and without the restrictions of clothing. Add clothes and now the body can’t repel moisture the same way, the skin can’t breathe the same way, sweat is trapped in clothing, and you can’t feel the environment around you. Plus there’s chaffing, nipple rub, all sorts of things that athletes hate, all thanks to unnecessary clothing. Oh and then of course bacteria gets trapped in clothing; how gross is that!?

Let’s talk how destructive clothing can be on the body. Back to my grandma’s case, tight clothing has been linked to health problems due to restriction of blood and lymphatic fluid. Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer conducted a research study and found that wearing a bra more than twelve hours a day without wearing it to bed increases the chances of getting breast cancer by 21 times! If that wasn’t enough, how about this for the hardcore “never-nudes”: The same study found that women who wear bras even to bed are one hundred and twenty five times more likely to get breast cancer! Unbe-friggin-lievable! And for the guys in the audience, tighty whities have been linked to testicular cancer. The moral of this story: let em hang! The idea behind this research is that when clothing impedes the natural flow of fluids in the body, it cannot naturally remove any cancer-causing toxins that may be building up. Scary stuff.

Our clothes-compulsiveness is making us unhealthy. Remember, if people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way.
– Oscar Wilde